Quote

To delve into history entails, besides the grievance of hard work, the danger that in the depths one may lose one’s scapegoats.

Jacques Barzun

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Jacques Barzun
Age: 104 †
Born: 1907
Born: November 30
Died: 2012
Died: October 25
Critic
Cultural Historian
Historian
Philosopher
University Teacher
Writer
Depth
Danger
Scapegoats
Lose
Delve
Loses
Entails
History
Scapegoat
May
Grievance
Hard
Depths
Work
Besides

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Let us face a pluralistic world in which there are no universal churches, no single remedy for all diseases, no one way to teach or write or sing, no magic diet, no world poets, and no chosen races, but only the wretched and wonderfully diversified human race.
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By the time I was 9, I had the conviction that everybody in the world was an artist except plumbers or people who delivered groceries.
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Above all, do not talk yourself out of good ideas by trying to expound them at haphazard meetings.
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Simple English is no one’s mother tongue. It has to be worked for.
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To denounce does not free the self from what it hates, any more than ignoring the past shuts off its influence.
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An artist has every right - one may even say a duty - to exhibit his productions as prominently as he can.
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Science is, in the best and strictest sense, glorious entertainment
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Convince yourself that you are working in clay, not marble, on paper not eternal bronze: Let that first sentence be as stupid as it wishes.
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Like Rousseau, whom he resembles even more than he resembles Voltaire, Shaw never gave a social form to his assertiveness, never desired to arrive and to assimilate himself, or wield authority as of right.
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Bad writing, it is easily verified, has never kept scholarship from being published.
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The philosophical implication of race-thinking is that by offering us the mystery of heredity as an explanation, it diverts our attention from the social and intellectual factors that make up personality.
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Art distills sensation and embodies it with enhanced meaning in a memorable form - or else it is not art.
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Old age is like learning a new profession. And not one of your own choosing.
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The piano is the social instrument par excellence... drawing-room furniture, a sign of bourgeois prosperity, the most massive of the devices by which the young are tortured in the name of education and the grown-up in the name of entertainment.
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I have always been - I think any student of history almost inevitably is - a cheerful pessimist.
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Above all, the ability to feel the force of an argument apart from the substance it deals with is the strongest weapon against prejudice.
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Democracy, to maintain itself, must repeatedly conquer every cell and corner of the nation. How many of our public institutions and private businesses, our schools, hospitals, and domestic hearths are in reality little fascist states where freedom of speech is more rigorously excluded than vermin?
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Intellect has nothing to do with equality except to respect it as a sublime convention.
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Tennis belongs to the individualistic past - a hero, or at most a pair of friends or lovers, against the world.
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Strangers who have seen Shaw face to face are wont to report their surprise at his gentleness and consideration, his willingness to listen and his complete lack of pose.
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